Virtual Reality has the power to transport you to anywhere in the world, and NextVR has been one of the leaders of giving you a front row seat to live sporting events including hockey, boxing, NASCAR, basketball, soccer, and golf. NextVR recently signed a five-year deal with FOX Sports, who have the rights to broadcast the NFL, Major League Baseball, and the U.S. Open Golf Championship.
I caught up with NextVR’s VR evangelist Helen Situ at GDC talk about the highlights of the past year of their livestream VR broadcasts, and where they’re going next. They’ve been experimenting with a lot of different camera positions, broadcasting real-time binaural audio, augmenting the experience with graphical overlays, and exploring how to give the viewer more agency in choosing the different perspectives that are available.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
I think that live streaming is going to be one of the more compelling use cases for VR that will help bring it to the masses, and one indications of this is that there are more broadcasters starting to stream live sporting events. It was announced this week that the NCAA Final Four & championship games will be livestreamed to the Gear VR by NCAA March Madness Live, which is managed by Turner Sports, partnered with CBS and Oculus, and has sponsorship from Capital One. Here’s more instructions for installing the Gear VR app. These semi-final VR broadcasts happen on Saturday April 2nd, and the championship is Monday, April 4th.
NextVR has been a pioneer in VR livestreaming, and they expect that the content offerings will be compelling enough that sports fans will be willing to pay to have a front-row seat within virtual reality. David Nathanson is the head of business operations for FOX Sports, and he was quoted as saying, “For sponsors there will be naturally an opportunity to create immersive opportunities whether it’s pre-roll video, banners, VR commercial units, or integrating brands into the experiences we create. It’s uncharted territory.”
NextVR has been experimenting with VR livestream transmissions for over a year now, and had their first live sports broadcast to VIP tents during last year’s US Open Golf Tournament. Now that they have a five-year contract with FOX Sports, then you can expect to see a lot more premium content in the future delivered on all of the major VR platforms including Google Cardboard, Gear VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and even Sony PlayStationVR.
Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.982] Helen Situ: So I'm Helen Situ. I work at NextVR as a virtual reality evangelist. I work sort of at an intersection of marketing, business development, and product. I joined the company as a fourth employee, and we're now over 50 people. So it's been an incredibly exciting time to see virtual reality, both our company, NextVR, and virtual reality as an industry really sort of grow into maturity. And I'm super excited for the next year as we have all these different platforms coming out with the Rift, the Vive, PlayStation. It's just been a huge moment. I think it's a culmination that we're all really excited about.
[00:00:41.618] Kent Bye: Yeah, so talk a bit about the live streaming that you've been doing and maybe some milestones over the last couple of years in terms of some of the live stream events that you've been able to have so far.
[00:00:51.597] Helen Situ: Sure. So in terms of NextVR, we're a software technology company. We're primarily focused on live broadcasting. I think we're pretty well known for sports right now. We're doing a lot more music, live events as well. One of our recent big news announcements that we made was we had a five-year deal with Fox Sports. We're doing a ton of different virtual reality events live. A lot of them also include rebroadcasts of the games that we're doing. highlights packages from them, so it was super exciting. We kicked off that partnership with the US, Canada, and the Caribbean states. We did the Daytona 500, which was an incredible NASCAR race, super visceral. With this type of content, I think what we've seen over the last year doing so many different sports, two of the sports that really stand out to me that translate really well to virtual reality is hockey and NASCAR. These are two sports that are incredibly visceral in the action, the speed, the sound, the environment that happens, it isn't fully translated into television, which I think presents a really unique opportunity for these sports to make a sort of different splash in virtual reality.
[00:01:53.317] Kent Bye: I was able to jump in and check out a number of the next VR experiences and I think that the thing that was the most striking to me about the Daytona 500 race was the sound, was the positional audio as the cars went by. I just like really felt it in my body and it was really surprising to me how big of a difference just hearing it would make me feel like I was actually there at the track.
[00:02:14.059] Helen Situ: Yeah, we're doing a lot more around 3D audio, spatial audio, real-time. Super exciting, and I think all the different layers of the experience for virtual reality. A huge part of it is visual, but the audio presents so much more richness in the environment. It's so different when you're actually standing in a place and you feel the roar. of the cars going by from your left to your right. You feel it throughout your body, really. And so it's super exciting. And again, also with hockey or with the Big East Tournament, you get proud audio, you get commentary. There's so many things that are on the periphery of an experience that we're able to mix into the VR experience, the sports, and the fan experience.
[00:02:49.421] Kent Bye: So we're right here in March of 2016. So March Madness has started with the NCAA Tournament. So talk a bit about the live streams that you're doing there.
[00:02:57.752] Helen Situ: So around March Madness, we partnered with Fox Sports on the Big East Tournament. It was a men's basketball tournament. We did seven games. over three days, super incredible. We had over 15 hours of content with that. So 15 hours at the minimum of live streaming virtual reality that was available through the NextVR app on the Fox Sports channel for Gear VR. So we're super excited about that. We had a couple different perspectives in terms of camera angles that were really neat. We had you court side, but a little bit to the off the center. So you're able to get a really wide view of the entire court. And as the action got closer to the hoop, were able to switch the camera right under the basket. So you were having people dunking, making three-pointers, and you were there as if you're right under the basket, hanging on, seeing the action, super close. I think that was a really, really exciting camera angle for people, you know, sports fans, VR fans, everybody was really excited about.
[00:03:50.213] Kent Bye: Probably one of my biggest complaints about the next VR livestream so far is that sometimes the action seems so far away that, you know, it kind of looks like these like little pixelated, you know, for example, the debate, the people are so far away, you could hardly see their facial expressions. And I think that part of the value of watching a debate on TV is you get all those facial expressions and the body language that sometimes on the live stream it just seems to not really translate with if the camera is too far away so maybe you could talk a little bit about you know some of the feedback you've gotten on that and how you're going to be doing that in the future.
[00:04:23.237] Helen Situ: Yeah, absolutely. So when we partnered with CNN on the presidential debates, we did both a Republican one and a Democratic one. And, you know, sort of the set of where it was set up for was made for television. It was a very deep set. We're able to set a camera in the podium, so you have that opening moment where Hillary Clinton waves at you, and it's this direct moment where you have a connection with her, which was really incredible. But I think, you know, we're counting at 6K per eye right now. The resolution that we're pushing it at is the highest possible. We're really excited to have hardware display resolutions come up as well. So all of our content that we've done in the past will actually play clearer and more in focus as better headsets and better displays come out. But I think it's really interesting that we're working with our partners moving forward. And sort of in the past, sometimes there have been events where, you know, virtual reality is sort of just like a supplementary part of it. But I think as the space grows, the medium grows, You're really going to see more of a stronger, intentional camera placement for the VR cameras. How do we get closer? How do we optimize for this experience? Which is really great around that. But to your point around body language, facial expressions, that's a huge part around the contextual information you have. was something as important as a presidential debate. What I did see in the virtual reality experience that I didn't see on TV was a really interesting angle where you saw everybody on stage. And as they're asking questions of different candidates, it was interesting to see how people sort of tried to interrupt one another or vie for attention. So you would see, you know, maybe Bernie sort of hesitating to raise his hand up or try to move into the conversation, which on TV, they sort of cut those moments out. They bring together all the best perspectives of people just talking clearly into it. But when you're sitting there as if you were in the front row of a presidential debate, you really sort of see those moments of tension or hesitation or interruption that are much more subtle around it, but give a fuller perspective on what the relationship between the different candidates are and to the audience. I think that was really interesting about watching it there. But yes, unfortunately, the resolution hasn't quite caught up with where you see, you know, every micro expression of every candidate when you're sort of farther away.
[00:06:28.638] Kent Bye: Yeah and watching the NASCAR race there was a kind of an interesting like challenge because you're sitting there embodied but yet there's only just a few moments of maybe 30% of the time that the cars are going around the race that that perspective would be able to see anything. And so you're kind of cutting between different perspectives. But there's something that I think that, as a user, I almost wanted to be able to control what view there was. Because anyone who was cutting, it was hard for me to actually kind of track things in a certain way. And so I'm wondering if, in the future, you're going to give the ability for viewers to be able to choose what perspective they want to see.
[00:07:03.985] Helen Situ: Yes, absolutely. We're definitely very interested in moving forward with more sort of stronger agency for the user to be able to switch between different camera angles. So last year, at the beginning of the summer, we actually worked with Fox Sports on the US Open Golf Tournament. And in that live stream, we were able to grab five different camera feeds. And in that, you were just able to swipe forward on the Gear VR to switch between different camera angles, and that was definitely a huge thing, really, really well received, and I think we're definitely going to move in that pathway of having more agency within it. Something with NASCAR is really interesting, is even when I was at the racetrack, sort of going around the speedway and everything, It is incredibly fast. These cars just come roaring through the corner and then they're gone in like a moment. You know, they're so interesting to see that. So I think different sports will lend themselves to different things, but we're probably going to be moving toward the direction where you're able to both have, you know, your own ability to switch between different camera feeds. You want to be under the basket. You want to be on the other side of the speedway. We're going to allow the users to do that as well, but we'll probably continue to have one channel within that agency where you're able to switch to a feed where somebody will direct it. You'll know that you'll get every high action moment, every play that you don't want to miss. We'll have that all together in one area as well.
[00:08:15.895] Kent Bye: Has there been any discussion about putting a 360 degree video within a car that's a NASCAR race or is that going to be just too motion sickness inducing?
[00:08:24.783] Helen Situ: We're experimenting on a lot of things. Yeah, a lot of things. That's all I can say for now. We're experimenting with a lot of things. I think that's definitely a holy grail for some of the sports content, especially with racing and NASCAR. So we're working on a lot of different things, but that's something definitely on the horizon.
[00:08:41.029] Kent Bye: So talk a bit about the boxing matches that you've covered so far.
[00:08:44.583] Helen Situ: So we partnered with Fox Sports on the premier boxing champion card in January So it's actually at Sundance showing off the demos live in Utah and it was incredible I mean, I think boxing just naturally the stage for it is a little bit smaller. You're really close to the action It was perfectly made for VR as well And I think what was really interesting about the boxing match is that, you know, I haven't watched a ton of boxing to be honest, but I've seen it on TV before. You have these really intense moments where, you know, people are getting knocked out. There's blood, there's sweat, there's tears, things everywhere. But when you're watching it on TV, you're really seeing it for a second here. You're seeing an incredible knockout here. You go slow motion, you see it for a moment, but you're really sort of disjointed from the pain and the anguish that these fighters have because they're cutting from one experience to another. When I was watching in virtual reality, it was almost too painful to watch for me. I think maybe, I don't know whether it's I'm sensitive to it or the empathy that I feel, but when you're watching the same person move through getting hit, and you see their blood, their sweat, just sort of fly off their face, and you're watching it from the moment of impact, through the moment of pain, through to the aftermath. There's a very different relationship to the action that happens, which was different for me. And I've heard that also from other people, that when they watch the boxing, they almost wince, because it's so raw, compared to what you see on TV, where you see it for a moment, and then you jump away. You see it for a moment, and you jump away. And it's this continuous connection to the action, the sport, the story that is different about virtual reality.
[00:10:22.487] Kent Bye: So to me it was a little surprising that you signed a five-year deal with Fox. That's quite a statement that they're really willing to commit to VR in the long term for your company and that was quite a coup in a lot of ways. And so what other sports does Fox cover?
[00:10:37.818] Helen Situ: They cover a lot of different properties. NASCAR is one of them, March Madness, US Open Tournament. There's a ton of different things. We're super excited to work with them. Fox Sports has been a really strong leader in innovative technologies, both with their innovation lab on the studio side to sports. It's been incredible to work with them and build this partnership out. We've been working with them for almost a year and for a little bit over a year now, so it's been incredibly exciting to take it public. And to be able to do these events, you know, the Big East tournament that we did over the weekend, it was Thursday, Friday, Saturday, seven games over three days. We have rebroadcast and highlights in our app right now for Gear VR. But that was to a global audience. You know, we're seeing people from all over the world tune into it, which is super exciting about it. VR is really a global audience, and the more that we can marry these types of content that have passionate audiences behind them to global distribution and audiences. It's just really, really exciting because we're allowing people to teleport or travel virtually to these events that they love. And so that's just a huge reception. Very, very excited about working with XVR and Fox Sports together.
[00:11:43.243] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think it was a Fox Labs innovation that came up with the line of scrimmage and the augmented reality lines on the football fields. But this is something that, you know, a lot of the football broadcasts, if you notice, a lot of them are putting these augmented reality lines on the field because it really helps track to where the first down marker is, where the line of scrimmage is, how far they have to go, what down it is. sort of metadata that they're putting within the scene. I'm curious if you guys have started to look at some of these ways to embed information within the live scene without making it seem like there's a pop-up HUD that may be breaking presence.
[00:12:19.462] Helen Situ: Right, definitely, that's a great question and a great point around it, which is really interesting. Even when you read Ready Player One, this virtual reality of the future is this augmented virtual reality blend, and we've been experimenting a lot more with that. So with the Big East tournament, we had scoreboards that would come into play at the end of a quarter or whatever it was, but it's definitely interesting to see how we can marry more data in ways that really enhance the fan experience. At the end of the day, Fox and XVR are super aligned on how do we enhance the fan experience? How do we create something that's more fulfilling, brings fans, audiences, teams, leagues, sports, how do we bring those closer together in the ways that create value for one another? So when we're thinking about this augmented information overlay, graphics, whatever it is, we're always looking towards What brings more value to the fan experience? How do we improve what they're already seeing? If you were actually there in the stadium as well, what are the things that you're missing? What do you want on top of that? So I think that's definitely a lot of what we're working toward.
[00:13:19.495] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so we're right on the cusp of the consumer launch of the Rift, and soon after that, the Vive, and then into sometime later in October, the Sony PlayStation VR. So I'm curious if you have plans to go beyond the Gear VR into all these other headsets.
[00:13:34.297] Helen Situ: Oh, absolutely. We're going to be available for Google Cardboard in coming months. At CES, we announced that we're working with Qualcomm. We engineered directly on their Snapdragon 820 chip, so our player will work seamlessly with their content, with all the phones that are going to have a Snapdragon 820 chip in it. We're super excited about that. We're definitely going to be working toward being available for launch on Oculus Rift, Vive, PlayStation. Super excited to see all these hardware breakthroughs and platforms that we've seen over the last few years within the VR community sort of make their way into the public. It's awesome to see Best Buy having demos with a Samsung experience. PlayStation is going to be huge with the install base that they already have, so I'm really excited to see that. Yesterday, they announced at GDC that it's going to be $399 for the PlayStation VR. You're going to have to buy hand controllers, a camera on top of that, but incredibly excited to see that come to fruition.
[00:14:30.055] Kent Bye: What are some of the other big areas that you think beyond sports do you see that next VR would be starting to break into? Sure.
[00:14:38.310] Helen Situ: I mean, we're primarily focused around live events. What does live events mean in virtual reality? That's essentially our method of teleportation right now. How do I instantly be where I want to be, whether it's front row at a concert, courtside at a basketball game, whatever it is, we're really focused on bringing the highest level of quality and experience for live events that have huge passionate fan bases behind them to virtual reality and globalizing them. So we're working a lot on sports as you've known for the past couple of years. We'll have more announcements around music, live events as well, but we're focusing on live events.
[00:15:13.248] Kent Bye: So what is your intention for the business model moving forward? Is this something where you're going to be paid through licensing deals with Fox and then that's your income stream? Or do you foresee a future of like immersive ads? Or would these be premium experiences that people in the future were starting to pay for instead of, you know, at this moment we're seeing everything for free?
[00:15:31.437] Helen Situ: Sure. In terms of a business model, I mean, sports fans naturally are pretty inclined to understand paying for content. So you could very easily imagine sort of a pay-per-view or it could be something where it's bundled into a league pass or something of that sort. Working with premium content is great in that sense that people are really excited about the content that we're putting out. And I often hear from different channels and virtual reality communities and sports communities They're like, how do I pay for more? How do I get more content? So I think people are really excited about that. The more that we're able to deliver high-quality content, especially when it's live and it's these marquee events with artists or leagues or teams or whatever it is, people are incredibly excited. And we're really happy to bring that to a global audience.
[00:16:13.675] Kent Bye: So you've been really on the front lines of introducing VR to quite a lot of people over the last year. I'm just curious if you have any stories or anecdotes or favorite memories of introducing VR to people.
[00:16:24.025] Helen Situ: Yeah, that's a great question. I've been with XVR for about two years now and a ton of the different demos, experiences that I've had with people are with people for the first time. I think it never gets old and people are just, you know, what it is is that people connect with a childlike sense of wonder. and curiosity and openness. It is so unique about the platform that it's so intimate. When you put on this headset, you're being transported to another world. And I love that about the power, the emotional quality that it has. But some of the most remarkable anecdotes and stories I think about are just really simple moments. So I remember, you know, we had this demo of a 360 environment we captured at Pfeiffer Beach. It was sort of that doorway hole in this huge cliff overlooking a sunset. And people really created their own stories with that one piece that we had. I remember this lady that I met in LA at a Digital LA event, and when she took it off, her eyes were filled with tears. And this was just an environment where you had a 360 capture of this beautiful beach at sunset. It's pink, it's purple, it's blue. The waves are crashing up against you. And she took it off. She gave me this warm, strong hug and she was like, thank you. This beach is where my husband and I share some of our fondest memories together and this brought me to that. You know, and it's so incredible to see the way that people meld their own relationships and their own stories and their own worlds into virtual reality as well, even when it's something as simple as beach and it it's just been incredibly powerful emotionally to see the way people react to it whether it's something as intimate as you know the love of your life or whether it's biggest sports fan you know seeing their favorite player whether it's Steph Curry whomever it is score a slam dunk and you're right there I think That visceral emotional connection, the direct path between whatever it is on our side that we're filming and capturing and delivering to what they have with a relationship with it is just incredible. It's been really, really exciting to see how powerful this medium is.
[00:18:24.189] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:18:30.612] Helen Situ: The ultimate potential of virtual reality is empathy. You know, I'm incredibly passionate about how strong virtual reality is able to transport emotions between people, whether it's applied to sports, filmmaking, narrative, journalism, whatever it is. You know, one of the experiences that I've still had the strongest memory ever of experiencing is the perspective by specular theory. I saw it at Sundance two Sundances ago, and it's still something I talk about to this day. You know, virtual reality is such a powerful quality of conveying the spectrum of human experiences and emotions that it's able to impart on the viewer guilt, shame, excitement, anxiety, whatever it is. These emotions that are not as strongly drawn up in traditional media, whether you're reading a book or watching something on TV or in a movie, it's a direct path. The impact of emotions from virtual reality to audience happens in so much more of a compressed time period, I've realized. In a virtual reality, most of the experiences you're watching are 5, 10, 15 minutes. In the case of our live streams, anywhere up to like two hours or more. But the impact, the impression, the memory that you leave with your audience happens in a much shorter period of time. So I think that's an incredibly powerful part of it. Very passionate about empathy and emotion being transported in virtual reality.
[00:19:49.880] Kent Bye: Awesome. Anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:19:54.403] Helen Situ: I'm incredibly excited to be part of this community over the last two years. We've seen it grow. You know, I've written a bit about this in my article on Medium about why it uprooted my life for virtual reality. And it's insane to see where we're going on this trajectory. And in the next couple of years, we're really going to see more of a feedback loop between the audience and, you know, all these different technologies that we've been building on the hardware, the software, the content creation side. I'm incredibly excited to see the feedback loop sort of form between mass audiences and the creators and developers. I think that's going to be a huge part of the community here, and I'm super excited to be a part of it.
[00:20:29.809] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Helen. Thank you so much. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
